149 to Go

"I won't say we'll win the pennant," said Manager Joe McCarthy of the Boston Red Sox this spring, "but I will say this--the Red Sox will make runs." As the 1950 major-league season began last week, McCarthy was proved quite right; after four innings of the opening game, the slugging Sox led the world champion New York Yankees, 9-0. From the Boston viewpoint, the trouble was that later in the game Joe DiMaggio & Co. drove in nine runs in a single inning, eventually won, 15-10.

It seemed to be a hitter's week. In the three-game Yankee-Red Sox series, only Boston's Pitcher Joe Dobson managed to last nine innings. Such Yankee pitching reliables as Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi and Ed Lopat took heavy poundings from Boston bats. The Yankees gave the same treatment to Boston's Mel Parnell (who won 25 games last year) and to Ellis Kinder (who won 23). The main difference seemed to be that the Yankees had ace Relief Pitcher Joe Page, 32 who gets $35,000 a year for saving games for them, and the Sox did not. Page saved two of the first three games for the Yankees, worked in four of the Yankees' first five.

In the National League the champion Brooklyn Dodgers confidently started 1949's rookie-of-the-year, Right-Hander Don Newcombe, against the rejuvenated Philadelphia Phillies. Newcombe, who heard himself described all winter as a pitcher who could win 30 games this year, was able to finish just one inning. The Phillies dumped the Dodgers, 9-1.

Elsewhere in the first week of major-league baseball:

P:In Manhattan, Leo Durocher's New York Giants and Billy Southworth's Boston Braves met to answer the No. 1 hotstove question of the winter: Who got the best of December's big Giants-Braves trade (TIME, Dec. 26)? Boston won two straight, with a Durocher castoff, Outfielder Sid Gordon, winning the second game almost singlehanded with two homers, one with the bases full.

P:In St. Louis, Stan ("The Man") Musial got his first two homers of the season, but the Cardinals managed to drop four of their first five games.

P:Detroit's dark-horse Tigers, with potentially the best pitching in the American League, won their first four games, got off to the fastest start of anybody. At week's end the pushover Chicago Cubs shared first place in the National League with the Braves; the lowly St. Louis Browns were second in the American League. Those and other discrepancies would be corrected in the 149 or so games remaining.

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